


high set against the sky

by firstbreaths



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-07-29 21:44:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7700845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstbreaths/pseuds/firstbreaths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Lydia went to the Beacons Hill Fair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	high set against the sky

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you goes to Kris (@missgoalie75) for encouraging me when I had writer's block, for pointing out my Australian-isms, and for being crazy enough to run a Teen Wolf fest with me in the first place. It's been a wild ride (no fic related puns intended.)
> 
> Title from Lifeboats by Snow Patrol.

**one.**

When Lydia is six years old, her father takes her to the annual Beacon Hills Fair.

He buys her cotton candy and listens half heartedly whilst she chatters about English with Mrs. Markov and how she already gone up to a fourth grade reading comprehension level. 

Later that evening, the two of them ride the ferris wheel, Lydia leaning excitedly over the side, watching as the people and stalls below continue to shrink, the higher they climb. 

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he says to her, one hand on her shoulder as he too looks down at the ground, “the way that the ferris wheel just keeps spinning.”

“It doesn’t,” Lydia says, keen to demonstrate what she’s learnt, “the laws of physics say that an object can’t move in perpetual motion.”

Already, Lydia understands the laws of physics — the way she’s already learnt to slow down around her peers, to pretend like she hasn’t known her time tables since she was four and memorised her state capitals in preschool. Force equals mass times acceleration, and her heart can’t shatter if she doesn’t give them the tools to break it. If every action has an equal opposite reaction, then it can only make sense that holding back is the easiest way to push on through. 

Her father nods, but Lydia gets the sense that he’s not really listening. “So tell me about your friends,” he says, “what happened to those girls who used to come around after school?”

Lydia just mumbles something about them all being busy, and doesn’t say another word until the ferris wheel reaches the ground.

 

**two.**

When Lydia is twelve years old, she dreams of going to the fair. 

Not the Beacon Hills Fair, mind you, but the ones she reads about in books, the ancient circuses, the street stalls full of merchants selling exotic wares from across the New World. She reads fiction too; imagines what a fair would look like in Harry Potter’s world, and if it would be more or less enchanting than Diagon Alley. 

Pretending to be uninterested hurts so much more than she thinks it would if she was simply pretending to be dumb. Lydia wonders, sometimes, about the generations of scholars before her, the fights for women to earn their rightful place in academia, and what they’d think if they saw her using her extensive knowledge of adolescent psychology and a deft ability with makeup to convince her peers to leave her alone. 

(One day, when she gets out of this place and wins a Fields Medal, she’ll give them a shoutout.) 

In the meantime, the Beacons Hills Fair comes to town, and she bites her tongue when one of her friends starts freaking out about they’re all going to die on the rollercoaster, how quickly everything could go up in flames. 

None of them know how quickly she could calculate the odds of that. 

 

**three.**

When Lydia is sixteen years old, Jackson kisses her, pushed up against the fence in front of the dodgem cars at the fair. Lydia’s a mathematician, so she counts every one of them, mentally calculating the relationship between the number of times she kisses him and the likelihood he’ll stay (the only linear thing about this is the trajectory of her sinking heart). 

Jackson’s kiss is possessive, one hand resting firm against her waist and the other tangled in her hair. She’d like it a lot more if she didn’t know what it felt like to be possessed. 

“We’ll figure this out,” Jackson says, sounding like he’s discussing the weather, instead of his impending trans-Atlantic move. 

“I know,” Lydia says, and then kisses him again, because it’s easier than talking.

Afterwards, she’s waiting for her mom in the parking lot, leaning on the fairground fence, when she spots Stiles and Scott, trekking towards Stiles’ Jeep. They’re too far away for her to hear them, but she watches as they talk animatedly at each other, before giving each other a fist-bump.

Next thing she knows, Stiles is beside her, fists stuffed in the pockets of his jeans as he shuffles nervously on the spot.

Lydia glances up at him, raising an eyebrow. “What do you want Stiles?” she asks, not unkindly. 

“How are you holding up?” he says, all in a single breath.

Lydia purses her lips. “Fine. My boyfriend is a lizard who’s about to move to London, I’ve spent most of the past semester hallucinating, and when I went into the coffee shop yesterday, I swear half the customers thought I was crazy. One of them looked at me like I could throw a fit any minute.”

Stiles half smiles, half snorts. “The cafe up the road from the station? The service there is so terrible I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Even Scott threatened to get to mad once.”

“He didn’t.”

THere’s a pause, during which Stiles struggles to keep a straight face. “He didn’t.”

“Since it’s the best place to get a latte in Beacon Hills, I assume Scott was protecting the town from the horrors of an un-caffeinated Stiles Stilinski.”

She shakes her head as Stiles says, “I changed things up the other day. Had three Red Bulls … and a hot chocolate with two sugars.”

Lydia can’t even bring herself to laugh; she knows what it’s like to be unable to sleep. If she doesn’t close her eyes, she can’t wake up naked and screaming in the woods; it’s like her horror is a movie tattooed on the back of her eyelids, one she can’t pause. 

Stiles seems to know what she’s thinking. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he says. “I know you’re new to all this supernatural stuff, and I just wanted you to know that.”

“I know,” Lydia says. “You’ve got me, now. Time to step up your research game and figure this all out.”

Honestly? For a girl with an encyclopaedic knowledge of how the human brain plays tricks on you, she’s never been less sure of anything.

 

**four.**

When Lydia is seventeen years old, Stiles invites her to the fair. 

“Scott needs a distraction from thinking about Allison,” Stiles says over the phone, his voice slightly tinny through the speakers as she finishes off her morning beauty routine, “Although if you asked him, he’d say he needs a break from my dumb jokes.”

“Because pointing out your over-reliance on sarcasm is really inspiring me to attend right now.”

“Stabbing me in the heart would have hurt less.” Stiles pauses, and Lydia can picture him raising his eyebrow, the way one side of his mouth always droops when he smirks. It’s almost like having him in her room. “We can make fun of the mythological inaccuracies of the haunted house.”

Lydia laughs. “It’s not so much the mythological inaccuracies that bother me, as much as the scientific ones. I’m willing to suspend reality to believe that the Civil War was  _ really  _ about Abraham Lincoln hunting vampires, but there’s no way they could have melted that much steel, that quickly, without an industrial oven.”

“So that’s a yes, then?”

Even though Stiles can’t see her, Lydia pretends to think about it, frowning at the mirror as she finishes off her blush. “Only if you throw in some cotton candy."

After all, Lydia can read this situation for what it is — a gesture of hope, a willingness to share in the belief that everything will be okay, and to be there for each other when it’s not. She just can’t tell which one of them is doing the offering.

“You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Stiles changes the subject after that, reading out loud from a blog post he stumbled across whilst doing research; somehow, the conspiracy theorists who believe that supernatural creatures are real are also the ones who wouldn’t be able to recognise a werewolf if it bit them on the neck. 

Five minutes after she hangs up, she gets a text from Scott.

_ ty 4 agreeing to save me from Stiles dumb jokes _ , it says, and Lydia pockets her phone and finishes braiding her hair, fingers fumbling as she ties it off at the ends and thinks about Stiles, and how he would do anything for his friends. 

Maybe she’s the one who needs the distraction. 

 

**five.**

When Lydia is twenty-one years old, she returns to Beacon Hills for the summer. 

She’s hovering in the lounge room of her mother’s house by the time Stiles’ Jeep pulls up in the driveway to take her to the fair, its engine spluttering, and she doesn’t even pretend to wait for him to knock before she’s opening the front door, and placing her hands on his shoulders, pulling him in for a kiss.

“Hello,” Stiles says as they pull apart, wearing an ear-splitting grin that reminds her of when they were fifteen. It’s no wonder that Lydia loves it more now that they’re twenty-one. “You never greet me like that when we live together, which can only mean that I have to move out.”

“Scott is in a happy relationship, Stiles, you couldn’t just turn his apartment into a bachelor pad this time.”

Stiles pouts. “You’re right. The only reason I keep him around any more is because he’s a better cuddler than you.”

The way he clings to her, arms around her waist as he peppers kisses to her jaw, the two of them swaying on the doorstep until Lydia’s mom comes out to say hi, suggests otherwise. 

The fairground is packed by the time they get there, and Lydia grabs Stiles’ hand, their arms swinging between them as they make their way through the gate. They check out the agricultural displays, and Stiles purchases a huge bag of toffee apples before grabbing dinner and checking out the rest of the fair with Scott, Isaac, Malia and Kira. (It goes well until Malia goes up against a kid at the balloon dart booth and shows no mercy, proceeding to pop a dozen balloons in one go, at which point Stiles and Lydia shoot an apologetic glance at Stiles and sneak off for ice-cream.) 

They’re sitting on a bench, finishing off their cones, when Stiles nods at the ferris wheel, which is spinning brightly in the twilight, high above the fairground. 

“For old time’s sake?” he says, already standing up and attempting to drag Lydia towards the ticket booth. She knows he’s got some romantic vision in his head of kissing her as they look out at the sun setting over the town, something that’s both so incredibly important and embarrassingly cliche that he won’t even have shared it with Scott, and, well — 

Lydia’s just finished her final semester of college with a 4.0 GPA and guaranteed entry to any post-graduate program she wants, the Beacon Hills’ fairground seems to be blissfully free of supernatural creatures, and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t up for a little fooling around at the top.

“We’re twenty-one, Stiles,” she replies, “hardly old enough to be archaeological specimens just yet.”

“Stilinski would make a great name for a fossil, though.” 

“You don’t get to name a discovery after yourself if you’re dead.”

“Guess it’s a good thing I don’t have plans to die any time soon, then,” Stiles says, as they reach the front of the line for tickets, and there’s a million things Lydia could say to that, but she settles for squeezing his hand tighter. 

As the ferris wheel starts to make its way to the top, Lydia looks over the edge at the bustling crowd below, a life she can never quite leave behind. Her roots are in this town; her blood spilt in its dirt, her screams echoing through its woods and her heart in Stiles’ hands.  

(She’s kind of glad to have gone to Caltech though; at least in Pasadena she finally has access to a decent shoe store.) 

“I know I just said I don’t have plans to die any time soon,” Stiles says, “but it has just occurred to me that I’m literally sitting on a thin metal plank, high above the ground.” 

“You’re telling me,” Lydia says, “that after  _ everything  _ we’ve been through, you’re afraid of heights?” She shakes her head, her hair spilling about her shoulders. “I will never stop being fascinated by human psychology.”

“Oi, I’m not a test subject! Or afraid of heights.” Stiles complains, “… although if you wanted to test your ability to distract me from how high up we are?”

Lydia punches him Stiles in the arm as he winks, pushing him into the side of the cart, which creaks and sways wildly. Stiles, of course exaggerates wildly, eyes widening comically and arms flailing outwards from his sides. 

“Go on,” Stiles says, and she raises an eyebrow, questioning. “I know that look in your eye — you’re bursting to tell me exactly what it is that keeps this death trap going.”

“The laws of physics,” Lydia says, and the tenderness of Stiles’ smile as he leans in to kiss her makes her feel like an object in perpetual motion, impossible, and never coming down. 

  
  



End file.
